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China Jails Environmentalist Wanted in U.S.

DALI, China — Justin Franchi Solondz, an environmental activist from New Jersey who spent years evading charges of ecoterrorism in the United States by hiding out in China, was sentenced to three years in prison by a local court on Friday on charges of manufacturing drugs in this backpacker haven.

After serving his time, Mr. Solondz, 30, who is on the F.B.I.’s wanted list, will be deported to the United States, where he faces charges stemming from what the authorities say was his role in an arson rampage that destroyed buildings in three western states as a member of a group related to the environmental extremist organization Earth Liberation Front. He was indicted in absentia in 2006.

The story of Mr. Solondz’s life on the lam spanned three continents, involved at least two aliases and ended in a smoky bar in one of the world’s most authoritarian countries.

Mr. Solondz’s journey started in the fall of 2005, when he joined his mother in Italy for a wedding and then traveled around Europe and Asia. His parents say he stopped communicating with them in March 2006, just before the F.B.I. announced the charges.

The trail went cold until March 2009, when the Chinese police arrested Mr. Solondz here in the mountains of Yunnan Province after he was caught with drugs and fake Canadian identification, according to his parents. During a daylong trial last month, Mr. Solondz pleaded guilty to drug charges and asked to be deported to the United States.

According to his father, Paul Solondz, the Dali police said they discovered 33 pounds of marijuana buried in the courtyard of the house that the younger Mr. Solondz rented, as well as what the prosecutor described as a drug laboratory inside the house.

Friends of Mr. Solondz in Dali said he went by the name Isaac Cox and was a familiar figure who favored black clothing, had a dog and rode a bicycle through the stone streets of Dali’s old section. (His mother, however, said court documents said he used the name David Isaac Hart.)

“He looked like a man on the run,” said a man who knew Mr. Solondz and did not give his name for fear of retribution from authorities and fellow foreigners. “Everyone who comes to this town is running away from something, some more than others.”

Marijuana grows wild in the region, and local women approach foreigners with the greeting, “Smoke ganja?” Until Mr. Solondz’s arrest, residents said, several bars and hostels catering to foreigners allowed people to openly sell and smoke marijuana.

Photo

Justin Franchi SolondzCredit
F.B.I., 2002

Then, last winter, the authorities swept into the town, at first going undercover, before returning with a translator and encountering Mr. Solondz at the Sun Island bar, popular with Western backpackers. His parents said the police discovered that he was carrying small amounts of opium and marijuana and he provided fake Canadian identification.

After learning his true identity weeks later, the authorities contacted American consular officials. A spokesman for the United States Embassy in Beijing declined to comment on Mr. Solondz’s case, citing privacy rules. Phone calls to court officials in Dali and Mr. Solondz’s lawyer were not answered on Friday.

Mr. Solondz’s parents frantically tried to find a Chinese lawyer, contacting their representatives in Congress. On the advice of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University, they hired Zeng Yuexing, dean of the law school at Kunming University of Science and Technology.

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During the trial before three judges at Dali’s Intermediate Court, Mr. Solondz apologized to the Chinese people and called Dali “a paradise,” his father said. The elder Mr. Solondz said he and his son’s mother, Bianca Franchi, traveled to China, but were not allowed to obtain a copy of the indictment until after the trial. They were forbidden to take notes in the courtroom.

Mr. Solondz’s parents, who never married, were later permitted to see him for an hour at a detention center. “After four years of not seeing Justin, there he was in shackles behind glass,” his mother said.

About 40 Americans are serving time in Chinese prisons, according to the U.S.-Asia Law Institute. A Chinese lawyer affiliated with the institute who helped Mr. Solondz’s parents hire Mr. Zeng said the fact that Mr. Solondz is an American and a fugitive wanted by the United States might have played a role in his relatively light sentence. “China’s central government is certainly aware of this case,” said the lawyer, who asked not to be named for fear of antagonizing the authorities. “Diplomatic communication must have influenced the result.”

When Mr. Solondz returns to the United States, he is expected to stand trial on charges of arson and conspiracy for what the authorities say is his connection to an offshoot of Earth Liberation Front, known as the Family, which the F.B.I. classifies as a domestic terrorism cell.

According to federal authorities, Mr. Solondz made incendiary devices that destroyed a horticulture center at the University of Washington in Seattle in May 2001. Prosecutors also accuse him of burning down buildings and vehicles in Oregon that same day, and linked him to a later arson attack in California. The combined loss of property totaled more than $5 million.

Friends and family members said Mr. Solondz, an avid soccer player who grew up in Randolph, N.J., adored nature and became an environmental activist at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. That is where he became involved with the Earth Liberation Front, investigators say. He was arrested at protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 2001, his mother said, and he appeared in a film by Briana Waters, his former girlfriend, that documented their campaign to protect old-growth forests from lumber companies. Ms. Waters is serving six years in prison for her role in the horticulture center attack.

Mr. Solondz’s mother, who lives in Denville, N.J., said she did not believe that her son engaged in arson.

Paul Solondz, a construction executive whose home in West Orange, N.J., has a “God Bless America” sign on the front door, rejected the depiction of his son as a terrorist. “Compared to those horrible people who want to kill as many people as possible in the name of religion, the avowed mission of this organization is to not harm any people or animals,” he said. “This should not even be called terrorism.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 28, 2009, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: China Jails American Environmentalist Wanted by F.B.I. in Attacks. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe